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Guide

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Campaign management

Last updated on Feb 10, 2025

Reading time: 2 min

In this guide:

Overview
Manage a campaign
Frequently asked questions
Helpful resources

Overview

After starting your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign, you can modify your campaign details and review item-level performance. In this guide, you’ll learn how to manage your campaign information.

Manage a campaign

Step 1 – Get started

Navigate to the Search Engine Marketing page in Seller Center.  

Step 2 – View campaign details

To view detailed campaign summary details about an active campaign, select the campaign name under the Active tab. The summary includes overall metrics for the campaign to date as well as item-specific performance.

Impressions: Total number of impressions for the campaign
Clicks: Total number of clicks for the campaign
Spend: Total amount spent on the campaign
Revenue: Total sales for the campaign
Return on ad spend (ROAS): Revenue earned for every dollar spent on a campaign

Step 3 – Make updates

If you need to make modifications to your campaign, select the More Options menu (ellipses) and choose from the following options:  

Edit: Edit campaign details (Campaign name, Budget, Start and End Dates) or add items to a running campaign. 
Clone: Duplicate existing campaign including items and duration. 
Stop: Stop running campaign.

Frequently asked questions

How do I improve my campaign performance?

To improve campaign performance for new campaigns, you can filter your items during campaign creation by selecting Suggested items.

To improve campaign performance for running campaigns, focus on making sure that items have high Offer Listing Quality, Competitive Price and Fast Shipping to ensure competitiveness.

There are many external factors that influence campaign performance including the volume of searches related to the item, the appeal of the item to consumers, the quality of the item's content, and the frequency of bidding in our algorithms. These factors can impact the speed at which spend is reflected. 

Is SEM automatically paused once I lose the Buy Box for the advertised items?

How does the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) bidding algorithm work during my campaign?

The bidding algorithm is when you add an item to a campaign. It goes through two phases of bidding: Learning and Optimizing.

Learning: The learning phase is the initial stage of bidding, where our algorithm tries to understand how your item performs on Google Shopping Ads. During this phase, our algorithm focuses on driving traffic to your item and collecting data on how many impressions, clicks and conversions it gets.

During this phase, you may see a limited number of impressions and clicks or inconsistent ROAS. This is normal, as our algorithm tests different bid levels and learning from the results. This takes an average of 7-10 days and may take longer if there is high competition on Google.

Optimizing: The optimizing phase begins immediately after the learning phase ends and is the final stage of bidding. At this point, our algorithm has learned enough about your item to only bid at a level at which additional spend will return an optimal ROAS. This serves to limit campaign spend on items that are low-performing.

During the optimizing phase, you may see a stable or increasing number of impressions or clicks, and ROAS that are closer or higher than your target. This means that our algorithm is spending wisely and maximizing your revenue from ads. However, if the algorithm determines it’s not able to generate an optimal ROAS for an item, then it’ll reduce spending on that item. This may happen if the item has low demand, high competition or other factors that affect its performance.

Helpful resources

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